One of the most influential groups calling for the government to end the war on drugs is an organization of law officers that have first hand experience of its failures, according to The Albuquerque Tribune. The Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), a lobby group against the war on drugs, is gaining attention because it has over 2,000 members that range from former police officers, and prosecutors to judges. The group includes many high-ranking officials such as a previous New York City police chief and Gary Johnson, a former Governor of New Mexico.

It is estimated that the government has spent over $500 billion on the war against drugs, but members of LEAP all have first-hand experience and maintain that current policies are having no effect. They argue that instead of sending drug users or sellers to jail, the government should focus its resources on treatment. Supply cannot be stopped in a free market, but demand can be reduced through appropriate intervention.

Despite massive budgets and resources thrown at the problem LEAP members point out that usage of methamphetamines is exploding throughout the country. Jack Cole, the executive director of LEAP says, “This is not a war on drugs. It's a war on people.” White House officials have accused LEAP of being misguided and irresponsible.

staff reports - Free-Market News Network

__________________
I hate it when they say, "He gave his life for his country." Nobody gives their life for anything. We steal the lives of these kids. We take it away from them. They don't die for the honor and glory of their country. We kill them."-- Admiral Gene LaRocque

Before we decide to decriminalise we might do well to actually put the major players in jail.

The cops are corrupt. Period. They are owned by the big crims. The crims are owned by big business and the Intelligence services.

Though I tend towards a "libertarian" outlook on what people can and cant do with their bodies, including what drugs they take without hurting others, some drugs are not good for the soul nor for the community.

We cannot call for decriminalization till we actually deal with the issue that ALL drug dealing at the highest levels is controlled by the Western Intelligence services.

International counternarcotics efforts are ineffective or actively counterproductive, according to speakers at a conference on drug production and state stability held at the Centre d'Études et de Recherches Internationales (CERI) in Paris on 6 October.

According to Alfred McCoy from the University of Wisconsin, the problem is the erroneous US and UN presumption that the international illegal drug supply is fixed, meaning that repression of trade in illegal narcotics would be an effective measure to decrease it. However, McCoy explained that it is the demand that is inelastic, which means users will do what they need to maintain access to drugs, while growers will increase their planting, or new producers or areas will enter the market to make up for drugs eliminated by enforcement efforts.

After fighting five drug wars in 30 years at a cost of USD150 billion, McCoy said, "Washington has presided over a six-fold increase" in the world opium supply from 1,000 tonnes in 1970 to between 5,000 and 6,000 tonnes today. Meanwhile, the number of US heroin users has gone from 68,000 to more than one million during the same period and, despite 15 years of US bilateral anti-drugs efforts, Andean coca production doubled to 600,000 tonnes by 2000.

Other speakers pointed to the problems that can arise in states where supply-side eradication policies have achieved local success. Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, a research fellow from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, said that rushed eradication efforts in Afghanistan could eliminate one-third of the national economy without developing the legal economy to replace it. In Myanmar, he said, movement towards an opium ban could lead to social and political instability because farmers in the affected regions, who are already among the poorest in the world, have not been given alternatives to opium income.

It's amazing when you think about it that, like the Oil scam, the "we cant stop the drug trade" scam continues. Though I hear not for much longer.

Take this point...

"...rushed eradication efforts in Afghanistan could eliminate one-third of the national economy without developing the legal economy to replace it. In Myanmar, he said, movement towards an opium ban could lead to social and political instability because farmers in the affected regions, who are already among the poorest in the world, have not been given alternatives to opium income."

He's not saying they cant wipe it out. He's just saying that their might be some upset natives. With some of our own logic we can see that the world community can simply give the farmers the meager amount they already get. Say $40 million U.S and you just wiped out 1/3 of the worlds Opium. Not bad eh?

Also note he warns about "rushed eradication efforts". They plan to wipe it out their soon. The Oz SAS are there for this purpose as is a SAS contingent to join them from the U.K. next year.

In fact ALL of Asia is about to cop it.

Only 30 years late.

We dont need "decriminalization". We need law enforcement to do their job. So much of the excuse for the "Police State" will dissapear with the drug trade.

U.N. drug control officers said the Taliban religious militia has nearly wiped out opium production in Afghanistan -- once the world's largest producer -- since banning poppy cultivation last summer.

A 12-member team from the U.N. Drug Control Program spent two weeks searching most of the nation's largest opium-producing areas and found so few poppies that they do not expect any opium to come out of Afghanistan this year.

"We are not just guessing. We have seen the proof in the fields," said Bernard Frahi, regional director for the U.N. program in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He laid out photographs of vast tracts of land cultivated with wheat alongside pictures of the same fields taken a year earlier -- a sea of blood-red poppies.

A State Department official said Thursday all the information the United States has received so far indicates the poppy crop had decreased, but he did not believe it was eliminated.

Last year, Afghanistan produced nearly 4,000 tons of opium, about 75 percent of the world's supply, U.N. officials said. Opium -- the milky substance drained from the poppy plant -- is converted into heroin and sold in Europe and North America. The 1999 output was a world record for opium production, the United Nations said -- more than all other countries combined, including the "Golden Triangle," where the borders of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar meet.

Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's supreme leader, banned poppy growing before the November planting season and augmented it with a religious edict making it contrary to the tenets of Islam.

The Taliban, which has imposed a strict brand of Islam in the 95 percent of Afghanistan it controls, has set fire to heroin laboratories and jailed farmers until they agreed to destroy their poppy crops.

The U.N. surveyors, who completed their search this week, crisscrossed Helmand, Kandahar, Urzgan and Nangarhar provinces and parts of two others -- areas responsible for 86 percent of the opium produced in Afghanistan last year, Frahi said in an interview Wednesday. They covered 80 percent of the land in those provinces that last year had been awash in poppies.

This year they found poppies growing on barely an acre here and there, Frahi said. The rest -- about 175,000 acres -- was clean.

"We have to look at the situation with careful optimism," said Sandro Tucci of the U.N. Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention in Vienna, Austria.

He said indications are that no poppies were planted this season and that, as a result, there hasn't been any production of opium -- but that officials would keep checking.

The State Department counternarcotics official said the department would make its own estimate of the poppy crop. Information received so far suggests there will be a decrease, but how much is not yet clear, he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"We do not think by any stretch of the imagination that poppy cultivation in Afghanistan has been eliminated. But we, like the rest of the world, welcome positive news."

The Drug Enforcement Administration declined to comment.

No U.S. government official can enter Afghanistan because of security concerns stemming from the presence of suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden.

Poppies are harvested in March and April, which is why the survey was done now. Tucci said it would have been impossible for the poppies to have been harvested already.

The areas searched by the U.N. surveyors are the most fertile lands under Taliban control. Other areas, though they are somewhat fertile, have not traditionally been poppy growing areas and farmers are struggling to raise any crops at all because of severe drought. The rest of the land held by the Taliban is mountainous or desert, where poppies could not grow.

Karim Rahimi, the U.N. drug control liaison in Jalalabad, capital of Nangarhar province, said farmers were growing wheat or onions in fields where they once grew poppies.

"It is amazing, really, when you see the fields that last year were filled with poppies and this year there is wheat," he said.

The Taliban enforced the ban by threatening to arrest village elders and mullahs who allowed poppies to be grown. Taliban soldiers patrolled in trucks armed with rocket-propelled grenade launchers. About 1,000 people in Nangarhar who tried to defy the ban were arrested and jailed until they agreed to destroy their crops.

Signs throughout Nangarhar warn against drug production and use, some calling it an "illicit phenomenon." Another reads: "Be drug free, be happy."

Last year, poppies grew on 12,600 acres of land in Nangarhar province. According to the U.N. survey, poppies were planted on only 17 acres there this season and all were destroyed by the Taliban.

"The Taliban have done their work very seriously," Frahi said.

But the ban has badly hurt farmers in one of the world's poorest countries, shattered by two decades of war and devastated by drought.

Ahmed Rehman, who shares less than three acres in Nangarhar with his three brothers, said the opium he produced last year on part of the land brought him $1,100.

This year, he says, he will be lucky to get $300 for the onions and cattle feed he planted on the entire parcel.

"Life is very bad for me this year," he said. "Last year I was able to buy meat and wheat and now this year there is nothing."

But Rehman said he never considered defying the ban.

"The Taliban were patrolling all the time. Of course I was afraid. I did not want to go to jail and lose my freedom and my dignity," he said, gesturing with dirt-caked hands.

Shams-ul-Haq Sayed, an officer of the Taliban drug control office in Jalalabad, said farmers need international aid.

"This year was the most important for us because growing poppies was part of their culture, and the first years are always the most difficult," he said.

Tucci said discussions are under way on how to help the farmers.

Western diplomats in Pakistan have suggested the Taliban is simply trying to drive up the price of opium they have stockpiled. The State Department official also said Afghanistan could do more by destroying drug stockpiles and heroin labs and arresting producers and traffickers.

Frahi dismissed that as "nonsense" and said it is drug traffickers and shopkeepers who have stockpiles. Two pounds of opium worth $35 last year are now worth as much as $360, he said.

Mullah Amir Mohammed Haqqani, the Taliban's top drug official in Nangarhar, said the ban would remain regardless of whether the Taliban received aid or international recognition.

"It is our decree that there will be no poppy cultivation. It is banned forever in this country," he said. "Whether we get assistance or not, poppy growing will never be allowed again in our country.